Life of a Navy Spouse.

Your partner is constantly gone. Especially when he's a Nuclear Machinist Mate (basically a nuclear operator/engineer—like Homer J. Simpson but on a huge boat with +3,000 people on it!)

If you're like me, you probably married your childhood sweetheart. I met him when I was 14 years old.

Yup, that's us! He's the one with the Bruce Lee haircut; I liked him so much I was too shy to take a picture next to him!

Here's us now:

We've been together for 14 year and have been married for almost six years (we totally eloped in Vegas):

(We kinda don't age, huh? It's that Filipino blood!)

It's been a tough road with the Navy. We dealt with four cross-country moves over the past five years, and gearing up for another one. While he was deployed for nine months, I worked on my M.F.A. in Fiction at Mills College. I got to visit him in Manama, Bahrain, which is one of the most cherished moments in my life:

My husband is finally getting out of the Navy in March 2016. We've been waiting six long years for this moment. He's currently deployed right now, but we try hard to keep up our relationship (most of the time by laughing):

I am thankful for the Navy helping us get to where we are today. We've seen the world together and apart. He's visited Croatia, France, Spain; I got to visit Italy for a writing residency. We've lived on opposite coasts. We grew to love the South and the East Coast (though, we still think the West Coast is the Best Coast). We fell in love with New York together. Without the Navy, we wouldn't have been able to travel, wouldn't have been able to sustain ourselves in this economy, and wouldn't have grown this much in the past six years, all because the Navy constantly threw us curl balls we had to overcome, in order to keep our marriage alive.

So, thanks, Navy. I don't say thank you a lot (for a lot of reasons beyond personal and mostly historical/political), but I am grateful for these past six years of my husband's active duty service. At the same time: we can't wait to get out!